A Taxonomy for Management and Optimization of Multiple Resources in Edge Computing

Edge computing is promoted to meet increasing performance needs of data-driven services using computational and storage resources close to the end devices, at the edge of the current network. To achieve higher performance in this new paradigm one has to consider how to combine the efficiency of resource usage at all three layers of architecture: end devices, edge devices, and the cloud. While cloud capacity is elastically extendable, end devices and edge devices are to various degrees resource-constrained. Hence, an efficient resource management is essential to make edge computing a reality. In this work, we first present terminology and architectures to characterize current works within the field of edge computing. Then, we review a wide range of recent articles and categorize relevant aspects in terms of 4 perspectives: resource type, resource management objective, resource location, and resource use. This taxonomy and the ensuing analysis is used to identify some gaps in the existing research. Among several research gaps, we found that research is less prevalent on data, storage, and energy as a resource, and less extensive towards the estimation, discovery and sharing objectives. As for resource types, the most well-studied resources are computation and communication resources. Our analysis shows that resource management at the edge requires a deeper understanding of how methods applied at different levels and geared towards different resource types interact. Specifically, the impact of mobility and collaboration schemes requiring incentives are expected to be different in edge architectures compared to the classic cloud solutions. Finally, we find that fewer works are dedicated to the study of non-functional properties or to quantifying the footprint of resource management techniques, including edge-specific means of migrating data and services.Comment: Accepted in the Special Issue Mobile Edge Computing of the Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing journa

Adsorption and Reduction of NO on Tin(W)Oxide Doped with Chromium(lll) Oxide

Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) is claimed to be a good choice for event handling applications. Current object- oriented telecom applications are known to suffer from additional complexity due to event handling code. In this paper we study the maintainability of FRP programs in the tele- com domain compared to traditional object-oriented programming (OOP), with the motivation that higher maintainability increases the service quality and decreases the costs. Two implementations of the same procedure are created: one using Haskell and the reactive-banana FRP frame- work and one using C++ and the OOP paradigm. Four software experts each with over 20 years of experience and three development engineers working on a product subject to study were engaged in evaluations, based on a questionnaire involving five different aspects of maintainability. The evaluations indicate a higher maintainability profile for FRP compared with OOP. This is confirmed by a more detailed analysis of the code size. While performance was not a main criteria, a preliminary evaluation shows that the OOP prototype is 8-10 times faster than the FRP prototype in the current (non-optimised) implementations.Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or re-publish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permissionand/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].</p

Latency-aware Resource Management at the Edge

The increasing diversity of connected devices leads to new application domains being envisioned. Some of these need ultra low latency or have privacy requirements that cannot be satisfied by the current cloud. By bringing resources closer to the end user, the recent edge computing paradigm aims to enable such applications. One critical aspect to ensure the successful deployment of the edge computing paradigm is efficient resource management. Indeed, obtaining the needed resources is crucial for the applications using the edge, but the resource picture of this paradigm is complex. First, as opposed to the nearly infinite resources provided by the cloud, the edge devices have finite resources. Moreover, different resource types are required depending on the applications and the devices supplying those resources are very heterogeneous. This thesis studies several challenges towards enabling efficient resource management for edge computing. The thesis begins by a review of the state-of-the-art research focusing on resource management in the edge computing context. A taxonomy is proposed for providing an overview of the current research and identify areas in need of further work. One of the identified challenges is studying the resource supply organization in the case where a mix of mobile and stationary devices is used to provide the edge resources. The ORCH framework is proposed as a means to orchestrate this edge device mix. The evaluation performed in a simulator shows that this combination of devices enables higher quality of service for latency-critical tasks. Another area is understanding the resource demand side. The thesis presents a study of the workload of a killer application for edge computing: mixed reality. The MR-Leo prototype is designed and used as a vehicle to understand the end-to-end latency, the throughput, and the characteristics of the workload for this type of application. A method for modeling the workload of an application is devised and applied to MR-Leo in order to obtain a synthetic workload exhibiting the same characteristics, which can be used in further studies.

Functional Reactive Programming as programming model for telecom server software

This thesis studies the use of the functional reactive programming (FRP) framework reactive-banana in a prototype which simulates a part of a Long-Term Evolution (LTE) base station: the Radio Resource Control connection setup procedure. The investigated problem is to determine whether using this FRP framework leads to an implementation with suitable performance and improved maintainability compared to the current implementation. Enhancing the maintainability of the base station software enables quicker and more efficient maintenance activities, which lead to an improved customer satisfaction. Moreover, it means that less programmers need to work on maintenance, so they can work on developing new products instead. In order to compare the use of the FRP paradigm to the one currently used in the base station implementation, the object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigm, a second prototype using this paradigm was also implemented. Having two prototypes implementing the same designed reference model (which is a simplified version of the Radio Resource Control connection setup procedure) enables a relevant comparison of the two paradigms. The two prototypes were then compared in terms of performance and maintainability. The maintainability evaluation consisted in using both software metrics and experts’ assessment, as this has been proven to be the most efficient way to evaluate software maintainability. Four experts were asked to fill in a questionnaire after reviewing the code of the two implementations. The comparison of the two prototypes indicates that the FRP prototype is more maintainable than the OOP one, but the OOP prototype has better performances than the FRP one. Moreover, the performance of the FRP prototype during the conducted tests indicates that such an implementation of the FRP paradigm is not suitable for a real base station

Corrigendum to “A Taxonomy for Management and Optimization of Multiple Resources in Edge Computing” (vol 2018, 7476201, 2018)

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The Necessary Shift: Toward a Sufficient Edge Computing

Edge computing is becoming a reality and attracts an increasing interest both from academia and industry. This is driven by its promises of enabling/improving use cases thanks to, e.g., lower latency or alleviated network load. This paves the way for edge computing having a huge impact on our daily lives in the (near) future. However, except works dealing with energy efficiency, studies of the (un)sustainability of edge computing are almost nonexistent, which is worrying. In this article, we advocate the need to go beyond energy efficiency and face the resource impact of edge computing. At this point when we are still able to influence design choices, it is the responsibility of this community to ensure future systems do not become unsustainable down the line. In particular, we suggest embracing a sufficiency mindset, aiming at reducing absolute resource impact and defining what is a good enough service level. After explaining why we need to move beyond efficiency, we explore the concept of sufficiency and identify related challenges. Then, we propose a first version of an edge sufficiency toolkit as a helper for shifting toward a sufficiency mindset. Finally, we illustrate the use of this toolkit in a case study.Funding Agencies|Swedish National Graduate School in computer science</p

The Dark Side of Cloud and Edge Computing: An Exploratory Study

International audienceInformation and communication technologies are increasingly pervasive in our everyday lives. Their use has greatly evolved from an ancillary service to a component of all our activities, anytime, anywhere. To this aim, we rely heavily on cloud computing and, more recently, on edge computing. Hence, their contribution (or obstruction) to the sustainability of our society at large is pivotal. Unfortunately, cloud/edge provisioning has a dark side: it too often prioritizes economic gain over the cost of long-lasting sustainability. Also, sustainability is often absent from the discussions in the cloud/edge research community. To start the discussion and highlight a number of sustainability shortcomings of the cloud and edge computing paradigms, we carry out an exploratory study involving experts-in-the-field, capture their inputs in the form of so-called unsustainable patterns, and complement them with examples of possible countermeasures. The results of our study include: (i) the definition of a Pattern Model, (ii) a catalog of unsustainable patterns for the cloud and edge computing paradigms, and (iii) the identification of preliminary countermeasures and takeaways in order to make these two paradigms more sustainable

Characterization and modeling of an edge computing mixed reality workload

The edge computing paradigm comes with a promise of lower application latency compared to the cloud. Moreover, offloading user device computations to the edge enables running demanding applications on resource-constrained mobile end devices. However, there is a lack of workload models specific to edge offloading using applications as their basis.In this work, we build upon the reconfigurable open-source mixed reality (MR) framework MR-Leo as a vehicle to study resource utilisation and quality of service for a time-critical mobile application that would have to rely on the edge to be widely deployed. We perform experiments to aid estimating the resource footprint and the generated load by MR-Leo, and propose an application model and a statistical workload model for it. The idea is that such empirically-driven models can be the basis of evaluations of edge algorithms within simulation or analytical studies.A comparison with a workload model used in a recent work shows that the computational demand of MR-Leo exhibits very different characteristics from those assumed for MR applications earlier.Funding Agencies|Swedish National Graduate School in Computer Science (CUGS)</p

Maintainability of Functional Reactive Programs in a Telecom Server Software

Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) is claimed to be a good choice for event handling applications. Current object- oriented telecom applications are known to suffer from additional complexity due to event handling code. In this paper we study the maintainability of FRP programs in the tele- com domain compared to traditional object-oriented programming (OOP), with the motivation that higher maintainability increases the service quality and decreases the costs. Two implementations of the same procedure are created: one using Haskell and the reactive-banana FRP frame- work and one using C++ and the OOP paradigm. Four software experts each with over 20 years of experience and three development engineers working on a product subject to study were engaged in evaluations, based on a questionnaire involving five different aspects of maintainability. The evaluations indicate a higher maintainability profile for FRP compared with OOP. This is confirmed by a more detailed analysis of the code size. While performance was not a main criteria, a preliminary evaluation shows that the OOP prototype is 8-10 times faster than the FRP prototype in the current (non-optimised) implementations.Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or re-publish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permissionand/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].</p